Suparna Sharma is no stranger to crime reporting. A seasoned journalist with stints at Deccan Chronicle and Asian Age, and now freelancing, she has covered crime, conflict, and corruption extensively. Her latest visual investigative story, in collaboration with Anand RK and Bloomberg’s Natalie Pearson, has brought the Pulitzer Prize, often called the Oscars of Journalism, to India. The project, which exposed the scale of rising cyber arrests across the country, won in the Illustrated Reporting and Commentary category. Sharma now sits down with Deccan Chronicle for an interview.
First of all, congratulations on the award. I heard you say in an interview that you’re crying now and then because of the happiness and shock of winning it. I hope the reality has set in.
Thank you, thank you so much. Yes, the crying has come down. I was feeling very overwhelmed for about two days. All the lovely, warm messages and congratulatory calls from friends and colleagues made me emotional. I’m okay now, I haven’t cried today.
TrAPPed was a story on digital arrest, a sinister cyber fraud. As a freelance writer-reporter, how did you come aboard this project?
This was Bloomberg’s project for which their investigations team was looking for a reporter in India. They interviewed a few reporters and decided on me. Like all freelance journalists, I sometimes pitch stories to editors, and sometimes stories come to me.
Did you know Anand RK and Natalie Pearson, who also worked on this story before joining hands for this project?
No. I met them on the project and was amazed by their talent. We were working together for almost 9 months — like a full-term pregnancy — during which we researched five Digital Arrest scams. We travelled to Mumbai, to small towns in Odisha, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab, looking for scammers, to interview victims of Digital Arrest and cops who had investigated the cases.
Tell me how you and the team worked on this graphic story. What was the process like?
We went to all the locations portrayed in the illustration and took photographs. But there were a few places we could not access, like the victim, Dr. Ruchika Tandon’s house. So for those, we relied on detailed interviews, and we used our investigative skills to get the smallest details right. The editors on this story, in fact, the entire graphic team, worked so hard to convey the claustrophobia and trauma of Digital Arrest, while making sure that the minutest details are based on facts, just like it is in any journalistic article.
You are not new to crime stories. Did this project proceed as you had planned, or were you surprised or disheartened at any point?
Yes, crime is not new, nor are crime stories. But cybercrime is a different ballgame. For me, the frustrating part was that when we approached the government to get data about digital arrest cases in this country, we got a “no, thank you” response to our RTI.
Every single report now says cybercrime is growing exponentially. At the same time, our developing country is adapting to digitisation, growing tech, and AI, and we are seeing its good and bad effects.
Rampant cybercrime in India is a byproduct of the massive push to Digital India, where everything, from opening banking accounts to doing massive transactions, doing KYC for SIM cards, is all online. Many countries have done this, but they first put guardrails and made sure there were no cracks in the system that could be exploited by scammers.
And the scammers are proving to be smarter than our government, the police and our banks. In most Digital Arrest cases, police have only been able to catch people in whose name SIM cards were issued, or desperate, poor people whose bank accounts have been used in the scam. Most of these people had no idea about the scam.
We see this crime happening over and over…to well-educated people, even ex-bureaucrats. While reading the article, I kept thinking: what if Dr. Ruchika Tandon had spoken to someone about what was happening to her? Her family eventually went to the police… What did your interviews reveal about why victims stay silent?
It is easy to make the assumption that you or I would not have fallen for this scam. And that is one of the biggest problems with how we are viewing this scam… we blame the victim, and not the scammers, not the ecosystem of easily available bank accounts, SIM cards, not the banks, which are not doing their job at keeping our money safe.
This is a very sophisticated, very elaborate, multi-layered scam. The scammers are very well trained; they have a script where they play good cop, bad cop. They manipulate victims emotionally and psychologically by threatening them with arrest and jail term, by telling them how their family, their children, will be shamed, and their lives and careers destroyed. And all the while they keep saying, ” We will help you get out of this. While one says, “Ma’am, I know you are innocent, and I am trying really hard to help you,” another cop will disagree and say they should be arrested owing to the gravity of their “crime”. These mind games put the victims in a mental paralysis that makes it hard for them to make decisions – decisions that, in a normal situation, seem so simple.
But the scammers are so tactical that the victim feels nobody else can save them but these very people. These scammers, who are clad in police uniforms, keep sending victims official-looking documents like arrest warrants, court orders, and RBI notices to keep them trapped.
The scammers play mind games; they use information they gather from the victims against them. They isolate the victims by sending them a long list of rules of being under Digital Arrest — victims must keep their phone’s video on all the time, including at night; no phone calls to anyone; no visitors; no talking to anyone; no newspapers; no watching news on television.
They isolate the victim and make them emotionally dependent on them. It’s just like being kidnapped. One can argue that people can just switch off their phones. But these days, when people trust everything they see on their phones, when people’s lives are fully dependent on their phones, they believe that police can arrest them via their phones.
The victim in this case, Dr. Ruchika Tandon, is a neurologist. She is a very bright, very brave, very educated woman who has never lied in her life, never broken a rule. She simply trusted the people who called her and told her that there is a case against her, and they would investigate it and help her clear her name.
Ruchika has got back a small portion of the money she lost. And no one knows how long it will take for all her money to be recovered. And like most victims of Digital Arrest, she too was shamed, yet she has had the courage to talk about her ordeal because she doesn’t want anyone else to fall victim to this scam.
What about the scammers? What is driving them into this?
While investigating this story, we met about four scammers, including an educated, newly-married former banker who was like the crypto queen of the scam group.
We met another alleged scammer who grew up in a Mumbai slum, first in his family to receive a college education and degrees, who was desperate to take his parents out of the slum and give them a good house, a good life. But he was merely able to earn 15000 from his job at a Jio kiosk. So he paid an agent, went to Cambodia, where he was taken to a scam centre. He earned about Rs 60,000-80,000 per month, had free housing and food. There was an ex-Navy officer, a UPSC aspirant and many such regular people among the scammers.
Yes, some of the scammers are remorseless criminals who are scamming people because they want to make quick money, and lots of it. They have no qualms.
But many are desperate for jobs that pay decent money, but can’t find any such jobs. So they join these scam centres, these scam groups.
I was astonished at how organised, well-structured and functional these scam centres are. They have departments, hierarchies, promotions, and increments. There are office hours, lunch breaks, and weekly off days.
The story format of this story is interesting, an anime style that reminds me of Amar Chitra Katha, and it could really hook young readers who enjoy Japanese manga. What does that choice say about journalism, its future, and what it means for online readers?
There are stories that work better in print format, and there are stories that work in newer and more visually engaging formats. We have to be creative about telling our stories, about experimenting with formats.
The graphic illustration format requires several skills — an illustrator, editors who conceptualise what to show, what not to show, how the story will flow, writing the script, which is sharp, with short sentences, but powerful.
Anand, who did the illustration, is so outstanding. The editors who worked on the graphic story — Ken Armstrong, FlynncRoberts, Jio Chakraborty, Amanda Cox, Nadja Popovich — were all so talented, so devoted to getting the smallest things, the shading, the colour and the facts right. They put so much work into it – into the dialogue, the colouring. Some frames did not even have dialogues, but the artwork conveyed the horror of what Dr. Tandon was going through.
In India, there is institutional dismantling of the press, and there has been erosion of public trust in journalism and journalists because of a few rotten apples. Most of these people are in television, and I can’t remember the last time our news channels did any groundbreaking journalism.
But despite falling readership, most of the good investigative reports in the recent past have come from independent journalists. Many editors and reporters have done amazing investigative work that matters.
You know, since I quit my job in 2022 and became a freelance journalist, many people have said to me, “Do something else. Journalism is dead. There’s no money in journalism, and there is no future.” But since the announcement of the Pulitzer award, I have received so many calls from journalists, especially print journalists, saying that while they are happy for me, they are happier because this award feels like a validation of the work honest, ethical Indian journalists have been doing, and want to keep doing.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
